under such interferences with the private arrangements of trades and employments; and it will require much more extensive resources to bring up the condition of the young dressmaker to anything like what we should desire.
Instead of begging and beseeching of employers and their fine-lady customers to spare and favour the workwomen, the way to proceed is to take the case out of their decision altogether. Wistful dependents on the self-denial and generosity of two such classes as those of tradeswomen and their customers will never be very healthy or cheerful. They must get their case into their own hands, if they are to prosper. There are two ways in which this may come to pass,—two directions in which it may be aimed at.
There must be a sufficient limitation of numbers to enable the workers to make terms. One of the recent newspaper correspondents calls upon us to see and admit that the girls may blame themselves for their miserable fate, as they choose to go dressmaking, instead of doing something else which they consider less genteel. They might be healthy and prosperous as cooks or housemaids; there are others, some may add, who as pupil-teachers have been actually trained for a higher order of occupation: but the temptations of the dress-making are irresistible. The servant girls long to be called “Miss,” and leave off caps; and the pupil-teachers to dress fine, and enjoy the gossip of the workroom rather than the hum of the school. This may be very true; but these are not the material out of which the most suffering class of dressmakers is formed. They are the daughters of struggling tradesmen or poor gentry; or of widowed mothers; or orphans thrown on their own resources. They are of this order, in addition to the class of apprentices, regularly brought up to the work.
How to bring down the supply below the demand is the question; and the answer is that the best, and the only sure way of effecting this is by qualifying women for a greater number of occupations; and yet more, for fulfilling well those which are already open to them. I am not going to enter here on this wide subject. All I need do is to point to the obvious truth that while girls remain unfitted for occupations which require higher qualifications than needlework demands, there will always be an over proportion of needlewomen; and dressmakers, as well as slop-workers, will have to accept any terms from their employers, and will have no power to propose any of their own.
It has been found a curious speculation during the lifetime of a whole generation, what would be the upshot of the social difficulty connected with the needle. On the one hand, there has been the revolution in the popular habits of dress, caused chiefly by the uprising of the cotton manufacture; and, on the other hand, there has been an apparent over-supply of needlewomen, instead of the scarcity which might have been expected. In old times, when the working-classes wore woollen garments, as stoutly put together as our shoes are now, and seldom or never washed; and when the gentry wore costly stout linens within, and woollen or stiff silk fabrics as upper dresses, the sewing was very elaborate and precise, but it was to last for years or for life. Each person had so few garments, and they were so seldom renewed, that the amount of sewing in a household was no more than could be easily managed at home,—however exquisite and time-consuming might be the stitching, and marking, and buttonholeing, and all the rest of it. The case has been rapidly altering ever since cotton fabrics became common and cheap. We have been expressing our thankfulness, for half-a-century past, that labouring men and their wives and daughters have clothes that will wash. The frequent clean shirt and gown are a priceless blessing to the class whose forefathers and mothers wore one under-garment for years together, enduring stench, vermin, and skin diseases, such as are found now only in the darkest corners of our civilisation, but this cheap cotton clothing does not last very long. If a suit of it is six times as cheap as the old, it may last only a third of the time. This more than doubles the needlework to be done,—or would do so, if the needlework were as good as formerly. Besides this, there are so many more to work for! With three or four times as many people living on our island, wanting three times as many garments made as formerly, there would seem to be an overwhelming quantity of needlework to be done.
M. Michel Chevalier has pointed to this fact as a sure prophecy of the introduction of machinery; and others have been frightened to think what society would have to pay for the making of its dress, from the prodigious demand which must be growing up for needlework. This last expectation, however, has never yet been fulfilled. The pressure of quantity of work to be done has long been so great that the quality has become exceedingly bad. There is hardly a good needlewoman to be had on any terms; and the shirts, gowns, frocks, and waistcoats of the people generally are put together in a way which our grandparents, of any rank or degree, would not have allowed within their doors; but yet the numbers of workwomen have always been out of all proportion to the wages fund existing for their support. Apparently, there has been the singular co-existence of too much work to allow of good work, and too many workwomen to allow of their getting their bread. The deficiency was in the wages fund, evidently. Dress was cheapened; the popular habits were formed on this cheapening of dress; and while the material cost so little, the stress would be laid anywhere before the cheap clothing would be allowed to become dear by the making. But for the over-supply of workers, either the wearers of dress must have paid dear for the making, or machinery would, according to its wont, have come in to meet the difficulty. As it was, the helplessness of a multitude of starving women, who could do nothing but sew, kept down the price of sewing, and put off the introduction of machinery.
In the days when poor needlewomen swarmed most fearfully, and were most at the mercy of the general customer, through the slopseller and the middleman, there were some of us who steadily foretold the advent of the sewing-machine. I, for one, did so, many years ago, and not only
